Michèle Foster’s Black Teachers on Teaching gathers the life stories of Black teachers born between 1905 and 1973: the first to teach in desegregated Southern schools, and others who taught in Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. She lets them speak for themselves about what desegregation took, what it gave, and about what they were trying to do in a classroom in the first place. Read together, they describe a people with a purpose for education that was their own.
Those teachers were on my mind reading the Hammer & Hope profile of our work at the Center for Black Educator Development. What stands out in the piece is the company it keeps. Vanessa Siddle Walker, Noliwe Rooks, Russell Rickford, Gholdy Muhammad, Camika Royal, and Micia Mosely, the scholars who have written the history of Black education, are quoted at length, and that is instructive. The usual story treats what Black people want from schools as a reaction to white folks. The history runs the other way. We had an agenda of our own, and we built schools to honor and manifest our agendas.
The Roots of the Black Education Agenda
Free Black people in Philadelphia were building their own schools in the 1700s. By 1828, Black men in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York had founded literary societies, reading rooms and lyceums where members paid dues, built libraries, lectured one another on what they read, and wrote down what learning was for: identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Nobody assigned that. They had children and a purpose, and they wrote a curriculum around both.
Before Brown vs Board of Education, Black educators across the South had already built two of the three things our children needed. Siddle Walker found it in the eleven file cabinets Horace Tate hid in an Atlanta attic: a hidden network of educators who built school climates that told children who they could be, wrote civics so potent that a Black Atlanta newspaper predicted in 1932 that the next generation would stand up and demand its rights, and quietly identified plaintiffs, raised money, and fed cases to NAACP lawyers.
Between 1939 and 1947, Black teachers’ associations working with Thurgood Marshall sued over the pay gap 31 times and won 27. What they wanted from Brown was the third thing, access, and they warned what anything less would cost. The country answered with mergers that erased their associations and, by some estimates, pushed more than 100,000 Black teachers and principals out of the profession.
In the decade after, activists who had watched the civil rights movement win and studied the limits of its victories built independent Black institutions across the country. Rickford describes what those schools were. They did not simply refuse white supremacy’s curriculum. They wrote another one, rooted in Black pride, the connection to Africa, and a global map of the fight against colonialism.
Nidhamu Sasa, where I spent my elementary years, was one of them. Classrooms named for liberation movements. Political science in elementary school. Sixth graders running a Friday meeting with no adults so first graders could learn what their voices were for and the plethora of ways they can used. None of that was a response to a school board. It was a decision Nidhamu Sasa’s staff made about who the children in their care would have the opportunity to be.
We Were Never Just “Reactionary“
When the story gets told as simply a reaction to white people, the agenda can disappear. Black demands become grievances rather than designs. The authors disappear too: Caroline LeCount and Octavius Catto, Horace Tate, the mothers who made a school in a room at 19th and Columbia, all reduced to footnotes in somebody else’s policy history. And the standard disappears. If the only aim was to get what white children had, we stop asking what our children needed, which was always more.
Mwalimu Shujaa, who helped found an independent Black school in Trenton in 1976, drew that line thirty years ago in Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education. Schooling, he wrote, is a process meant to perpetuate a society’s existing power relations. Education is how a people passes its values, aesthetics, history, and beliefs from one generation to the next. You can have one without the other, and Black children in this country have been handed plenty of the first. The book is circulating again; a professor who goes by Dr. Tip held it up on Instagram last month as a brief offering for anyone who would rather fix literacy rates than lament them. Molefi Asante’s line on its cover makes the same point: you cannot leave the education of your children to people whose purposes differ from your own and expect those children to walk the path of their ancestors.
Rooks put it this way in the profile: no one in 1940s Black America told Black children that hard work alone would open doors. They would not have said it, because it was untrue, and it is untrue today. That refusal had an agenda of its own. Tell children the truth about the world and equip them to change it.
The argument inside the tradition
The work we do now, the Freedom Schools Literacy Academy (FSLA), the Teaching Academies built on a LeCount-Catto curriculum, the Fellowship that carries a young Black teacher through year five, continues what Black people built first. We are a part of a national coalition focused on rebuilding a pipeline our people built and this country dismantled in a generation.
That does not make the work above critique. Rooks warns that more Black teachers can become the education version of more Black police officers. Muhammad says being a Black teacher is not enough. Mosely says we have lots of organizations and may not yet be organized. We take each of those seriously, and we notice where they come from. They are arguments inside the tradition. Only a people with an agenda argue about how to carry it out.
Anyone who teaches, parents, funds, or governs the schools our children sit in can ask one question: whose agenda is your classroom and school carrying? If the answer is a reaction to somebody else’s fears or somebody else’s test, the tradition has something older and better to offer. Read Foster. Read Siddle Walker, Rickford, and Muhammad. Study the Independent Black Schools movement. Then ask the elders in your own family what and how they decided their children would learn, and who taught it. I remain in awe of what my parents and teachers established, accomplished, and dreamt about when it came to educational and racial justice.
Our people decided long ago what our children were owed. Our job is to keep deciding, and to keep building.
Who in your family or neighborhood set the education agenda, and what did (and does) it look like?
